On May 5, Jeff Malcovich made an unusual hockey purchase.
The former CBC Radio traffic reporter lives in Winnipeg, where the NHL's Atlanta Thrashers are headed. The official name of the new Winnipeg franchise has been a subject of both debate and mystery since the move became a probability. So Malcovich decided to make an investment … as the owner of www.ManitobaThrashers.com.
According to the Winnipeg Sun, he dropped $30 for that URL and for MantiobaThrashers.ca, telling the paper, "I play on a beer league hockey team and we might change its name to the Thrashers, so it probably won't be a waste of money either way."
From the Sun, Malcovich isn't alone:
"I've been reading the news that the new team may be called the Falcons, so I decided to scoop it up before someone else did," said Stonewall resident Russ MacDougall, who bought FalconsHockey.net on May 20. "I guess it's like a lottery ticket."
MacDougall is hardly alone. A number of sites relating to the Falcons, Jets, Thrashers, and even Bears have been registered within the past few weeks as word has spread about the NHL's return.
As have Moose; check out what's on WinnipegMoose.com, an URL owned by Zago Creative.
As the paper points out, NHL team sites, with its full name followed by a dot-com, simply redirect to their NHL.com team pages. But it still could be valuable real estate for anyone who owns a URL with a variation of the Winnipeg team name … although one would expect True North to have taken care of such matters before the big reveal.
For the record: WinnipegJets.com looks like this and Winnipeg-Jets.com looks like this and WinnipegJets.ca looks like this … and while True North owns Moosehockey.com, something called CondoReady, LLC has owned Jetshockey.com since 1999.